


there's a grief that can't be spoken

by ohfiitz



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: F/M, Grief/Mourning, Introspection
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-13
Updated: 2016-03-13
Packaged: 2018-05-26 09:28:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 877
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6233344
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ohfiitz/pseuds/ohfiitz
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Because that’s all she has now, isn’t it? Half a heart, half a soul, empty spaces between her fingers and a last name that doesn’t sound as right and hers without his before it.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	there's a grief that can't be spoken

 

_I miss you._  
  
  


There was a time when she meant those words differently, back in the lab as they started picking up their pieces after he got back from the blue planet. There was a time when the gap she wanted to bridge was just one borne out of all their fears and failures, dug by their very own hands in a futile attempt to protect all they had left.  
  
Not this, not this endless unbridgeable void that stretches far beyond what half of her heart could reach. Because that’s all she has now, isn’t it? Half a heart, half a soul, empty spaces between her fingers and a last name that doesn’t sound as right and  _hers_ without his before it.

She’s angry.  
  
Her peripheral vision allows her a glimpse as the somberly-dressed men lower the coffin and depressing bagpipe music continues to hum, but she refuses to look. She stares hard at the ground, at her shoes, feigning indifference to the whole lot of wailing and (probably pretentious) crying currently taking place. She doesn’t look at anyone, but she can feel their eyes on her, watching her as if she’ll crack and break at any moment. She wouldn’t. Jemma Simmons is  too strong for that, but for a moment, she feels like doing it—lose her restraint in front of all the people—if only to spite everyone who’s been waiting for her to break down.  
  
They think she’s sad and distraught and helpless and grieving, but she’s not.  
  
She’s angry. And it’s probably not the most appropriate emotion to feel when your best friend just died saving your life (and the entire world, really, but she’s long learned that those are practically the same thing to Fitz), but, well, she’s angry.  
  
She was able to catch the exact moment Fitz died. He drew his last breath right within her space, and still he didn’t say it. She had witnessed a lot of dying moments before, but nothing compares to having that bloody idiot stop breathing in her own arms without having the chance to say what he clearly wanted to.  
  
_I love you._  
  
Three words and he just couldn’t say it.  
  
(But she knows he did, many times before, in every other form apart from those three little words. Back at the bottom of the ocean. At the lab when he offered to bring Will back. With every blasted risk he so stupidly took just to help her find her way home again and again and again.)  
  
And she hates it because she knows.  
  
And she hates Leo Fitz for being selfless to a fault, selfless to the end, selfless even in his death.  
  
She wonders if she even got to know Leo Fitz at all.  
  
She remembers that one time at the Academy, both of them sprawled in his bed and arguing about a particular question in their Chemical Kinetics homework, and he had claimed that he never, never once in his life— _never, Jemma, I swear_ —got any equation wrong. She sneered in his face, because _really, Fitz, don’t be ridiculous. I’m pretty sure you’re not_ that _smart._ (And oh boy was she so wrong, because they discovered three days later that his answer was indeed the correct one).  
  
She finds it funny now, laughs about it in front of his grave because for the first time, Leopold Fitz, brilliant engineer and unappreciated genius, got the equation wrong. He did the math and got it wrong. She could try solving it now, rewrite the problem he had taken upon himself to solve, but she’s here, watching him dive into a new kind of depth he cannot swim from, and no amount of math or science can undo the fact that her best friend in the entire world is gone.  
  
His death for her life, that was his solution, and she scoffs at his stupidity because  _that’s not how it works, Fitz. That’s not how_ we _work._  
  
It makes her angry. At herself, for not doing what she always does and slap some sense into him when he tried to put two and two together and arrived at the conclusion that he was not enough. At the universe, for bringing a man as fearless and pure-hearted as Leopold Fitz into her life, only to take him back when she has so deeply tangled her soul with his.  
  
She’s angry at a lot of things, but not at Fitz. Never at Fitz. She can hate him for the method by which he chose to bring their story to a close, but she can never fault him for saving her, because he did it out of love, and that’s just what Fitz does. He loves. He loves and he loves and he refuses to live without the people he loves.  
  
Fitz died for her, that much she knows, and she wonders if she’ll ever learn to live with that.  
  
Maybe she doesn’t want to.  
  
Maybe she never will.  
  
__  


_I miss you._ She whispers to nothing in particular—to the chilly air, hoping that the gusts of wind are strong enough to reach the parts of him that used to be hers but now are dead and gone.

 

She feels the wind whisper back.

 

_I’m here._

 

**Author's Note:**

> I'm so sorry. I've actually had the earliest version of this sitting in my drafts since the end of S1, when I was all WHAT IF FITZ DIED AFTER THE POD. But anyway, it never felt right to post it but then they did the "I miss you" "I'm here" thing in the last episode and then I was all WHAT IF MOURNING JEMMA AND GHOST!FITZ. Hence, this. Title is from _Empty Chairs At Empty Tables_ from Les Misérables.


End file.
